Community Engagement and Opportunities
Transform your community through digital strategies that will greatly enhance economic development and civic opportunity. The Knight Center of Digital Excellence works with your Knight Community to identify opportunities and interests, develop partnerships, and build sustainable local programs that align with community priorities. The Center serves an an advisor for key local stakeholders to connect your community, helping you meet critical success factors through expertise in technology, funding, programs and stakeholder engagement.
Just as importantly, the Knight Center provides a forum for sharing experiences and building community knowledge around digital leadership and success - our Resource Center. This is a place where communities across the country can find thought-provoking, relevant information about connected communities, universal access, digital inclusion, community applications infrastructure and successful business models.
The Knight Center serves communities through three major program elements:
Connected Community Team  The Connected Community Team (CCT) partners directly with stakeholders in Knight Communities to conduct outreach, assess interest, build community vision and programs - ultimately helping with the development of community strategies and building local capacity for broadband solutions. Additionally, the Connected Community Team partners with Knight's local Community Directors to engage directly with stakeholders to assess interest and, where appropriate, develop programs. The Knight Center's CCT works closely with each community on local priorities, local partnerships, local investment models, and local governance. | Resource Center  The Resource Center serves as a central knowledge repository and forum for exchanging and expanding our collective knowledge in the areas of universal access and digital excellence, community technology strategies, funding resources, digital inclusion and other critical related topics. The Center captures best practices and case studies; provides on-demand research to Knight Communities; and develops tools, templates, processes, and plans to accelerate community transformation. Most Resource Center materials and programs are available to communities far beyond the 26 Knight cities. The Resource Center also supports the Connected Community Team by developing and documenting processes that will aid in the management and development of community initiatives while serving as a hub to virtually convene thought-leaders to focus on key issues and challenges confronting communities engaging in local universal Internet access projects. | Digital Opportunity Challenge Fund  The Digital Opportunities Challenge (DOC) Fund is a seed fund to assist your Knight Community in developing a progressive, innovative and collaborative connected community strategy. To ensure momentum is not lost, the Knight Center offers challenge grants to attract and retain broad engagement by civic leaders and the community at large, and to draw local resources to the table leveraging the grant funds. The Knight staff will develop the final framework for the deployment of the DOC Fund. |